Humans strike me as being awesome, especially compared to other species.
I feel like there is a general sentiment that nature has it figured out and that humans are disrupting nature.
But I haven't been convinced that is true. Nature seems to be one big gladiatorial ring where everything is in a death match. Nature finds equilibrium through death, often massive amounts of death. And that equilibrium isn't some grand design, it's luck organized around which species can discover and make effective use of an energy source.
Humans aren't the first species to disrupt their environment. I don't believe we are even the first species to create a mass extinction. IIUC the great oxygenation event was a species-driven mass extinction event.
While most species consume all their resources in a boom cycle and subsequently starve to death in their bust cycle, often taking a portion of their ecosystem with them, humans are metaphorically eating all the corn but looking up and going "Hey, folks, we are eating all the corn - that's probably not going to go well. Maybe we should do something about that."
I find that level of species-level awareness both hope-inspiring and really awesome.
I haven't seen any proposals for a better first-place species when it comes to being responsible stewards of life and improving the chances of life surviving past this rock's relatively short window for supporting life. I'd go as far as saying whatever species we try to put in second place, humans have them beaten by a pretty wide margin.
If we create a fictitious "perfect human utopia" and compare ourselves to that, we fall short. But that's a tautology. Most critiques of humans I see read to me as goals, not shortcomings compared to nature's baseline.
When it comes to protecting ourselves against inorganic superintelligence, I haven't seen any reasonable proposals for how we are going to fail here. We are self-interested in not dying. Unless we develop a superintelligence without realizing it and fail to identify it getting ready to wipe us out, it seems like we would pull the plug on any of its shenanigans pretty early? And given the interest in building and detecting superintelligence, I don't see how we would miss it?
Like if we notice our superintelligence is building an army, why wouldn't we stop that before the army is able to compete with an existing nation-state military?
Or if the superintelligence is starting to disrupt our economies or computer systems, why wouldn't we be able to detect that early and purge it?